[tptacek]

Not particularly fair. You also had XDR (ubiquitous on Unix systems), IIOP, TLV, ICE... not to mention what ever protocol designer for the past 20 years has used: network byte order integers and ASCII/UTF8 strings.

Some people just like ASCII, human readable protocols. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a little silly to suggest that the options for a packed binary encoding in 2007 were limited because Thrift and Protocol Buffers were too new.

[jacques_chester]

You're right, to my shame. I should've thought of XDR myself, after suffering through a lecture on it at uni.

I'd be interested in the original designer's remarks on using existing wire serialisation formats.

[pquerna]

I mentioned ASN.1 DER, but I honestly didn't think I should go into a history of XDR or other encodings. I guess I can't skip any history in a blog post....

[tptacek]

I was responding to a comment, not your post. I don't think you really need to justify using an ASCII protocol (though, again, I think HTTP query arguments are a poor choice).